The Jobs and Capabilities of the CEO Work Portfolio

Within the CEO Work Portfolio, there are jobs and capabilities. As a CEO, viewing your role through the lens of your main jobs – strategy, Board and investors, and running the business – and developing the capabilities of managing energy, managing relationships, managing conversations, and leveraging systems and structures, will help you increase your effectiveness and help you to regain agency and autonomy of your life and work.

Jobs

Strategy

It’s your job to create or to see to it that strategy is created, understood, aligned around, and executed, including strategic adjustments in the execution. 

Board and Investors

Public company CEOs are hired by the Board, which is chartered to protect the interests of the investors under securities law. As a CEO, your role is to engage with the Board wisely, diplomatically, and purposefully to support and promote a well-designed strategy. Remember, the Board’s main job is to hire you and to replace you when you’re ready or if you are failing.

Investors come in different sizes and shapes and have their own strategies and priorities. Which investors you focus on attracting ought to be a consequence of your strategy, though it’s not easy to completely control the mix. 

Running the Business

This is what new CEOs usually think of as their whole job. They are surprised to learn that there is so much else involved. Running the business entails the execution of strategy. This means selecting key leaders and chartering the operating mechanisms through which direction is set, decisions get made, performance is reviewed, and people get developed. CEOs don’t do the work (mostly). They choose the leaders who create the environment in which the work gets done. Then they engage those leaders and others in the organization through a series of conversations designed to focus the energy of the enterprise toward the successful execution of the strategy. Exhausted CEOs forget that it’s not their job to do the work.

Capabilities

Managing Energy

This capability is a matter of self-awareness. What energizes you? What saps your strength? If you don’t know how to give yourself energy, you will have a hard time giving it to others. Each of your three jobs, and especially running the business, requires that you generate more energy than you expend from your interactions. This means generating it first for yourself – being inspired by the work, by the mission, by the people, by the challenge, by whatever it is that lights your flame. It also means doing as little as possible of the work that saps your strength. You know what the sappers are (or we can quickly find out), and you most likely know someone for whom your kryptonite is their rocket fuel. Managing energy includes getting smart about collaboration.

Managing Relationships 

Physicists tell us that all there is in the Universe is relationships. Matter is energy in various states of relationship. Particles are packets of energy that coalesce when they interact, as when we measure them, and otherwise are smeared out over space-time as waves of probability. The presence of a particle is determined by its relationship to an observer. What does quantum physics have to do with being a CEO? Your job is a network of relationships. These include your executive team, their direct reports, their direct reports, and all of their combined relationships and their potential to replace you someday. Your relationships include your Board, the members, their relationships with each other, and to the governance model. The network includes investors, regulators, customers, channel partners, and so forth. The sheer number of relationships could overwhelm you. Fortunately, you don’t have to manage them all individually, provided that you understand this about relationship management:

• All people have purposes, concerns, and circumstances.
• If you are perceived as being unaware or uncaring about their purposes, concerns, and circumstances, they will resist you.
• If you are perceived as aware of and caring for their purposes, concerns, and circumstances, they will collaborate with you to create value.
• People’s perception of your awareness and caring is your personal brand. It has leverage and can show up even when you are not physically present.

Managing Conversations

All work takes place in conversation. There is a natural order to conversations that produce value. That order is align, act, adjust. Within each of these conversations, there are more specific conversations that produce alignment, action, and adjustment. Most conversations people hold are not designed to produce value. Instead, they produce waste. CEOs who do not recognize the difference are vulnerable to being co-opted by conversations that are not about executing the strategy. This may be about one executive’s status and power, a project team’s excuses for being late, or a board member’s personal self-interests. Managing conversations means paying attention to the purpose you are there to fulfill and listening for the intersection of all relevant players’ purposes, concerns, and circumstances. When you have an authentic intersection, you have a basis for alignment. Before that, you may get compliance, but you will not get the commitment. This will eventually sap your energy.

Leveraging Systems and Structures 

You know that you cannot be everywhere at once or even in the same month, quarter, or year. How do you ensure that your strategy receives the requisite energy, talent, and focus for its execution? You do this by seeing to it that the accountability structures, the reporting mechanisms, the hiring, selection, and development, and the cultural reinforcement systems are well-designed, interconnected, and maintained. CEOs who are exhausted view the structures and systems of their organizations as parts. CEOs who take their vacations and enjoy their time with their families view the structures and systems as integral to the living organism that is their organization. They see that a recurring failure to meet a standard in, say, the legal department may likely result in an unwise and unreviewed risk being taken in the supply chain. The CEO grasps the whole of the enterprise or at least senses the wholeness of its connections and interdependencies. Leveraging systems means sharing this sense with everyone in every setting and encouraging everyone to elevate their own conscious awareness to include more of the whole.

This is an excerpt from The CEO Work Portfolio: How to Regain Agency and Autonomy of Your Life and Work.